A better way of handling hidden elements in Selenium

We have already discussed how to interact with the hidden elements in the webpage in this blog.

There could still be challenges in identifying and performing specific actions on the hidden elements, especially when using Selenium WebDriver as the test automation tool, which can interact only with elements that are in visible state on the webpage.

Here are the couple of other solutions to interact with hidden webelements in a better way.

1. When we need to perform, just a click operation on the any webelement irrespective of the element having the unique html id assigned or not. We can use the below method.

a.        In case of ID exist for the element, we can use .getElementById javascript method to perform the click operation

String Script = "javascript:document.getElementById('testobject').click();";

((JavascriptExecutor) webdriver).executeScript(Script);

b.       In case there is no id or name assigned to the webelement, still we can interact as given below.

Identify the element by any of the standard webdrive By class.

WebDriver element = webdriver.findElement(By.xpath(“<locator>”));

Now the argument[0] will always represent the webelement holding by “element” object in the above statement.

JavascriptExecutor Executor = (JavascriptExecutor)webdriver);

Executor.executeScript(“arguments[0].click();”, element);

In fact we can even perform complex actions using javascript support like scrolling the current webpage view. Actually Selenium 2 or webdriver implicitly scrolls the page to the respective element to be clicked or to perform the action on it.

We can still perform the scroll actions explicitly using the below statement whenever necessary.

Executor.executeScript("arguments[0].scrollIntoView(true);", element);

2.  We can even perform the action on the specified elements by making it to visible during run time of the automation script.

Having the firebug addon in firefox as the tool to identify and debug the object locator effectively we can even change the any attribute value of the html element temporarily on any webpage.

Generally in web application, elements visibility is controlled majorly using the CSS (which are attached to webpages) attributes like style=”display: none;” as shown above.

We can change the style attribute or even add new attributes which can cause a temporary change in the application look and feel which helps to execute selenium automation scripts uninterruptedly.

Below, we have changed the style property as style=”visibility : visible; which has made the drop down or combo box as visible for selenium WebDriver interactions.

This can be performed during runtime of the automation test script using the below command. Again to remind you, we can use the javascript to change the attribute values dynamically.

Executor.executeScript(“arguments[0].setAttribute(‘style’, ‘visibility: visible;’);”, element);

With the above methods we can handle the hidden elements in an effective manner.

ByAutomationMentorwww.automationmentor.in
We provide hands-on training on automation tools and frameworks